By Jia H. Jung, California Local News Fellow
As 2023 drew to a close, AsAmNews went on a search for the year’s writing by Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander authors.
Minsoo Kang, MA, Ph.D., a European history specialist, Korean-to-English translator, author, and history professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis has been doing end-of-year roundups of works by Korean Americans for the Best of Korea cultural site since 2020.
He said that his 2023 list jumped to 18 books plus two short story collections from the usual five to seven books a year.
“This was an amazing freaking year for Korean American literature!” he exclaimed, in his video interview with AsAmNews.
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He looks forward to adding his first novel, The Melancholy of Untold History (2024) to next year’s crop.
Alice Stephens, a reviewer for the Washington Independent Review of Books, said she has also noticed an increase in output by Korean American writers and international, transracial adoptees over the years.
“I can only imagine there will be more,” she said.
A hapa Korean adoptee herself, Stephens released her first novel, Famous Adopted People in 2018 after publishers passed on her historical fiction ideas. Taking the advice to write about one knows resulted not only in debut authorship but unprecedented connections with the global adoptee community.
Visibility is the name of the game to keep the upward trend going for great works by writers of all Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander backgrounds.
Here is a selection of 23 books in alphabetical order by title, spanning all genres and subject matters. This is our attempt to capture a fraction of the diversity, beauty, and empowerment found in our communities’ voices.
Tell us your picks or anticipated titles of 2024 in the comments below!
The All-American: A Novel, Joe Milan Jr.
This novel begins with the kind of setup that people have seen in the news before. An international adoptee whose parents did not fill out the proper paperwork when he came to the U.S. as a baby lives without American citizenship and only finds out after being deported for a minor crime. The story’s protagonist, 17-year-old Bucky Yi, finds himself yanked out of his life in rural Washington State and plunked down in South Korea, with no knowledge of the country, its culture, or its language. On top of it all, Bucky ends up being conscripted into the military to fulfill the mandatory service required of all Korean males and gets assigned to a remote island.
The Apology, Jimin Han
Seoul-born Han, who grew up in New England and Ohio, spins a tale of three Korean sisters who are over 100 years old. Together, the women travel to the U.S. to protect a family secret, defend their family name, and prevent a curse upon their bloodline. Their dedication is so strong that it extends into the afterlife for one of the sisters. Reviewers have touted this ghost story and family saga hybrid as a masterpiece about diaspora, intergenerational trauma, and healing.
Banyan Moon, Thao Thai
The debut novel of Vietnamese American author Thai roots a story about Vietnamese mothers and daughters in a dilapidated Florida manor known as Banyan House. The main character, Ann Tran, has just found out that she is pregnant when she also learns that her beloved grandmother has passed away. She returns to her home state to confront her estranged mother Hương, the joint heir to her grandmother’s house. As the two women attempt to coexist under the same roof for the first time in years, Ann makes discovery in the attic that sets off concurrent narratives of her mother’s experiences in 1960s Vietnam and the present day in the coastal swamplands of America.
Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, Julia Lee
This nonfiction work of thought and journalism was written by a Korean American daughter of immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black Los Angeles neighborhood who lived through the 1992 Los Angeles race riots. Caught in the middle of the tumult between Black and White people in America, Lee finally took up the question of where Asian people fit into this country’s binary when she became empowered by Black writers while pursuing her Ph.D. in English. Now an English professor at Loyola Marymount University devoted to the study of African-American literature, she examines her lifetime of marginality and resistance within a Black and White dichotomy while imploring the rest of us to ask ourselves what we can do about our racialized positioning in society.
Chasing Pacquiao, Rod Pulido
Filipino Californian Pulido is the filmmaker of The Flip Side (2001), the first feature by a Filipino American to screen at the Sundance Film Festival, which he also made into a book entitled The Flip Side: A Filipino American Comedy (2002). The author is back with a YA coming-of-age book about a queer Filipino-American teenager named Bobby who is trying to get by in a violent high school environment and a community that disapproves of homosexuality. When he becomes outed in the worst way, his original plan of lying low evolves into a mission to take up boxing to challenge one of his tormentors. When his hero, boxer Manny Pacquiao, makes an unsavory statement about queerness, Bobby has to dig deep to hold himself up and decide his place in the world.
The Deep Sky, Yume Kitasei
Kitasei, a hapa Japanese American author with a high-powered day job in the New York City government, has released a sci-fi thriller set on the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. Humanity’s last hope is The Phoenix, a craft carrying 80 elites responsible for giving birth to progeny out in deep space. A woman named Asuka becomes the prime suspect in a terrorist attack after being the only one to survive a bomb that hits the spaceship. An underdog picked last for the mission and made to represent Japan even after having grown up in the U.S. as a biracial Japanese American, the accidental heroine takes it upon herself to clear her name and find the real culprit. Themes of miscarriage, fertility issues, terrorism, child death, racism, violence, gore, and profanity all serve to make this outer-limits fiction hit closer to home.
Evergreen, Naomi Hirahara
As a sequel to the Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning Clark and Division, Hirahara, a journalist and author of multiple books including the nonfiction Life After Manzanar (2018), has brought back Aki Ito. Two years have passed since Aki was released from a detention center that the U.S. government shoved Japanese Americans into after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After a period of resettlement in Chicago. Aki and her family return home to Los Angeles and find a community struggling to get back on its feet. When Aki, a nurse’s aide, realizes that an elderly Issei man admitted to her care with suspicious injuries is the father of Babe Watanabe, her husband’s best friend, she starts to worry whether Babe is abusing the elder and whether the Watanabe family is part of the wave of violence poisoning the neighborhood and threatening the Itos.
The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America, Saket Soni
One of The New York Times Notable Books of 2023 and shortlisted for the 2023 Moore Prize, this book-length act of investigative journalism by Indian American labor organizer Soni is a rocking exposé of how America exploited hundreds of laborers from India in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2004. The Indian immigrants paid their life savings to a scam thinking that they would earn green cards. They ended up trapped in a labor camp in Mississippi instead. Then, Soni intervened after receiving a mysterious call for help on his 29th birthday. The case remains one of the largest examples of human trafficking in the history of humanity. Now halfway to 50, Soni is the founder and director of Resilience Force, a national nonprofit that protects and advocates for workers who help places rebuild after natural disasters.
Happiness Falls, Angie Kim
This Good Morning America Book Club selection is told through the eyes of 20-year-old Mia, living in Virginia with her biracial Korean American family. One day, her younger brother Eugene and their father go out on a walk and stay out for a very long time. Eugene runs back into the house, bloodied and without their dad. Because of a rare genetic condition called Angelman syndrome, Eugene cannot articulate what happened. A suspenseful missing person story ensues, portraying a family as it struggles to understand one another in a life-or-death situation while bringing together themes of love, race, language, disability, intersectionality, and human connection.
Hula, Jasmine Iolani Hakes
Hakes is a non-native local of Hilo and a descendant of Filipino, Puerto Rican, and Portuguese laborers who immigrated to the Kingdom of Hawai’i in the 1800s to work on plantations. She wrote this book from her experiences as a professional traditional Polynesian dancer and mother raising one child with native Hawaiian ancestry and one without. The debut novel is about Hi’i Naupaka. Hi’i’s family is known around Hawai’i island for its contributions to hula dance and the community of Hilo. Yet, Hii’i has never met her legendary grandmother and does not know who her biological father is. She prepares to win the next Miss Aloha Hula competition with her whole being and identity wrapped up in what is really a quest to feel like she belongs in the family.
The Inheritors, Nadeem Zaman
Bangladeshi-born American writer Zaman, whose novel In the Time of the Others (2018) was longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, teaches in the English department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His new book, however, is not published by a U.S. imprint but by Hachette India and available on Kindle for global audiences. After living in Chicago for nearly 30 years, Nisar Chowdhury travels to Dakha in Bangladesh, the country of his birth, to sell his ancestral lands. There, he encounters a cold lawyer, an older cousin he used to be infatuated with, and a wealthy neighbor keen on getting hold of the estate.
Orphan Bachelors, Fae Myenne Ng
First-generation Chinese American writer Ng, known for her debut novel Bone (1993), has issued a memoir about her life in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The cover announces that the book contains reflections “on being a Confession Baby, a Chinatown Daughter, Baa-Bai Sister, Caretaker of Exotics, Literary Balloon Peddler, and Grand Historian of a Doomed American Family.” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, for whom Bone was a transformative piece of literature, told Vogue Singapore that the work “vividly connects Chinese immigrant history to the Asian American present—telling of a life built in a nation insistent on exclusion.”
Salt House Place, Jamie Lee Sogn
Filipina American Sogn, a first-time author, has made a splash with her adult thriller about Zee, Cara, and Delia, three best friends who spend a day at a lake in the Pacific Northwest when they are in their teens. Zee gets lost on the lake. Ten years later, Delia goes to reunite with Cara but finds her missing, too. She tracks down a women’s empowerment group that Cara has recently joined, and heads to the Oregon coast to join a retreat and hopefully find her friend. Instead, she gets sucked into a cult while trying to get to the bottom of her past.
Same Bed, Different Dreams, Ed Park
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Park’s ambitious and experimental epic weaves together a world in which the provisional Korean independent government established in 1919 Shanghai during Japan’s colonization of Korea continued to stay in control from behind the scenes, influencing all of modern Korean and global history as we know it. The three distinct narratives of the book come bounding out of the gates when a character named Soon Sheen (a shoutout to the revered naval admiral Yi Sun-sin of 1500s Korea) stumbles upon a book of revisionist history that seems to have been authored by the KPG – Korean Provisional Government.
The Sense of Wonder, Matthew Salesses
Matthew Salesses is a Korean adoptee and American writer of both fiction and nonfiction who was voted as one of Buzzfeed’s 32 essential Asian American writers of 2015. His newest novel follows three Korean Americans – a basketball player who is the lone Asian American in the NBA, his TV producer girlfriend, and the couple’s sportswriter pal. All three navigate the rollercoaster of popular culture in what Professor Minsoo Kang says is “an insightful and often hilarious look at the current state of Korean Americans in the larger American culture.”
Skull Water, Heinz Insu Fenkl
Recommended by both Professor Minsoo Kang and book reviewer Alice Stephens, this autobiographical novel provides a follow-up to Memories of My Ghost Brother, the author’s memoir about growing up as a mixed-race boy on a U.S. military base in post-war Korea. Fenkl, a Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, continues drawing on his experiences to create a complex narrative about biracial kids, their Korean mothers, and their U.S. servicemen fathers in 1970s Korea. In Skull Water, Insu and a group of his friends go on a search for a skull in which to collect water to cure his Korean uncle’s infected foot. The adventure exposes the underbelly of a corrupt and hypocritical Korea while detailing the identity struggles of someone who is the product of two opposing worlds.
Songs on Endless Repeat: Essays and Outtakes, Anthony Veasna So
When first-generation Cambodian American writer So died at just 28-years-old in 2020, he left behind an unfinished manuscript for Straight Through Camboland. The novel-in-progress was about a gay Cambodian American protagonist in a doctorate philosophy program at Stanford University, So’s real-life alma mater. Two years after the posthumous release of his debut story collection, Afterparties (2021), came out. The Los Angeles Times said that So “immortalized Cambodian California” with his portrayals of the refugee community and its descendants in Stockton. Now, publishers have curated a volume of his essays and unpublished fiction, helping readers further access an essential voice and great mind lost too soon.
Welcome Me To The Kingdom, Mai Nardone
In his first story collection, Thai and American Nardone, born and raised in Bangkok and now based there, details everyday life in his city through a suite of characters whose tales encompass a two-decade period. Nardone creates standalone narratives that interact, with characters moving in and out of each others’ stories. Using first, third, and second-person voices and occupying both child and adult perspectives, Nardone does for Bangkok what James Joyce did for Dublin with Dubliners, touching on the sex trade, gambling, abortion, jazz music, skin lightening, expat communities, and spiritualism through stories whose emotional value is altogether localized and universal.
When We Become Ours, edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung
This Young Adult adoptee anthology, edited by transracial Black adoptee Shannon Gibney and Korean international, transracial adoptee Nicole Chung, also contains the voices of Kelley Baker, Mark Oshiro, MeMe Collier, Susan Harness, Meredith Ireland, Mariama J. Lockington, Lisa Nopachai, Stefany Valentine, Matthew Salesses, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, Eric Smith, Jenny Heijun Wills, and Sun Yung Shin, with a foreword by Rebecca Carroll and an afterword by JaeRan Kim, MSW, Ph.D. The kaleidoscopic collection tells YA readers what it’s really like growing up adopted.
Perilous Journey: The Hmong Exodus After The Secret War, Tou Her
Hmong American artist Her was born in the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand and lives in Big Lake, Minnesota, where he has a studio. In 2022, he started a Kickstarter campaign to support the creation of an illustrated account of Hmong refugee experiences. He wanted to document the stories he never heard about while growing up in Central Wisconsin after he and his parents immigrated there in 1985. The stories originate from when the Vietnam War spread into Laos in the 1960s. The U.S. recruited approximately 30,000 Hmong soldiers to fight in the “secret war” on its behalf. Then, American forces abruptly withdrew from Southeast Asia in 1975. “The U.S. pulling out made it hard for those left behind, and fleeing from Laos was the only recourse,” Her told AsAmNews, adding that Hmong refugees initially did not have asylum in the U.S. because they were regarded as uneducated farmers with nothing to offer. Her exceeded his fundraising goal – this beautifully illustrated, heartbreaking black-and-white book, available digitally or in paperback on the Studio Her website, is the deliverable.
Where We Once Belonged, Sia Figiel
Figiel’s debut book was published in 1996 but has been gaining attention again thanks to a documentary film in production this year called I Of The Water about the author’s personal journey. Her book was the first novel by a Samoan woman to be published in the U.S. and went on to become a New Zealand bestseller and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize winner. Heroine Alofa Filiga grapples with repression, domestic violence, abuse, Western encroachment, and other dangers while also undergoing the adventures, fancies, and joys of adolescence in the village of Malaefou on Tonga. Giving the literary finger to White anthropologist Margaret Mead’s damagingly lasting Western gaze of Pasifika and its people, Figiel puts the weight of her own life experiences into a blend of prose, poetry, often untranslated Samoan language, and su’ifefiloi, a traditional Samoan storytelling form meaning “a woven garland of flowers” – loosely strung episodes that collectively create a potent cohesive narrative.
Yellowface, Rebecca F. Kuang
Kuang, the Chinese-born, bestselling, award-winning American author of Babel and the fantasy series The Poppy Wars, puts forth a satirical novel that jabs at White privilege and cultural appropriation in the publishing industry. Written in the first-person voice, the book tells the story of two Yale-graduated authors, June Hayward (White) and Athena Liu (Asian). June feels like her lack of success in comparison to Athena is because she is White. When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals the manuscript and tries to pass it off as her own under the nom de plume Juniper Song. She thinks maybe this will bring her the success she deserves.
Y/N, Esther Yi
Yi’s debut work is a surrealist novel about an unnamed 29-year-old Korean American transnational adoptee living in Berlin. When someone persuades her to attend a concert by a K-pop band, she becomes obsessed with Moon, the lead singer. She begins to write fan fiction about Moon under the user name fleur-floor, using the abbreviation “Y/N” – your name – so that fans can insert their own names into her stories. When Moon retires, the protagonist flies to Seoul on a one-way ticket. She starts to lose herself in the intertwinings between real life and fantasy until both narratives become almost indistinguishable. Eventually, a character named O appears on the scene to answer some deep existential questions – maybe.
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